Optimizing Industrial Generators

South Sioux City, a municipal utility with approximately 5,800 customers, sought to reduce the city’s energy costs by reducing energy purchases on the wholesale market during periods of high demand. The municipality identified two gas-fired gensets owned by one of its industrial customers as a prime opportunity for these reductions. Optimizing the dispatch of the gensets would reduce SSC’s real-time market exposure and yield savings beyond existing baseline.

Challenge

NextEra 360^TM worked with the customer to address multiple project constraints and align on project objectives, including:

• Shifting the genset dispatch hours from an established schedule to hours with greater financial value
• Operating the gensets at no more than 5,000 hours per year
• Not increasing the customer’s utility bill established dispatch scenarios, NextEra 360 also simulated the municipality’s load, incorporated demand forecasts, and adjusted the genset setpoints and run times to reduce the requirement for wholesale electric purchases

Solution

The team utilized NextEra 360 to optimize the genset run times in the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) market. The project kicked off with resource planning, which utilized NextEra 360 algorithms to simulate power system constraints and prior year load and pricing data. To assess potential cost savings versus established dispatch scenarios, NextEra 360 also simulated the municipality’s load, incorporated demand forecasts, and adjusted the genset setpoints and run times to reduce the requirement for wholesale electric purchases.

Result

• $700k of identified backcast net savings to the utility, an increase of $11 per kW-month
• 110% increase in energy savings potential from the gensets, using the optimized dispatch schedule
• 30% reduction in runtime, extending the time between system overhauls by 6 years
  

Implementation Timeline

2-months